Award-winning music producer Joel Little talks to Kim Hill about songwriting, ambition and the brand-new music-making hub he's created in Auckland.
He also shares four songs that have shaped his life.
Joel Little. Photo: Guy Coombes
Back in 2012, Joel had left the post-punk band Goodnight Nurse and was just getting into music production when his manager gave him a tip-off about a teenage singer with an amazing voice.
As a guy in his late 20s, who'd only written songs with friends before, the idea of working with a 14-year-old girl seemed a bit creepy, Joel says.
But one day Ella Yelich-O'Connor, aka Lorde, caught a ferry from Devonport, then a train to his studio in Morningside, and he met a young woman with extraordinary self-possession.
"As everyone knows, she's a force of nature … She came into the studio and was just more grown up and intelligent than I ever have been and ever will be. And we just hit it off."
In the first week, he and Ella recorded 'Royals' and two other tracks that would be on her 2013 debut album Pure Heroine.
"I had zero expectations but thought that the songs were great."
'Royals' ended up winning the Grammy Award for Song of the Year and Pure Heroine went multi-platinum.
Joel says he and Ella tried to write together for her follow-up album - what would become 2017's Melodrama - but it didn't pan out.
"There was a lot of pressure there for her to follow up what she'd done with Pure Heroine. I don't know, maybe seeing my face wasn't helping with that. It may have just been adding to the pressure.
"There are no hard feelings … it was just the way that she needed to do things to be able to make her second album the way she wanted to make it."
In turn, Joel says he just "went and got on with other things".
After 'Royals' there was plenty on offer to him - especially working with "versions of Lorde" - but he didn't want to repeat himself.
To give the music industry a crack, he moved to LA with his wife Gemma and their kids in 2014.
In Los Angeles, music producers only get a couple of days of songwriting time with an artist, Joel says, and it took him a while to get good at 'diving deep' in such a short space of time.
But he was equipped with some "great training" from a couple of years spent writing songs for TV commercials.
As a music producer in advertising, Joel had to come up with songs in all kinds of genres and learn to "read between the lines" when people were describing the sound they wanted - "a skill that really really helps".
After three years in LA, Joel eventually produced two further hit songs - 'Young, Dumb & Broke' by the American singer Khalid and 'Whatever It Takes' by the pop rock band Imagine Dragons.
In 2018, he and his family moved back to Auckland so the kids could have a New Zealand upbringing and feel like New Zealanders.
That same year, he hung out with American pop star Taylor Swift while she was touring Aotearoa, and a couple of weeks later she invited him to New York to write on her new album.
Because of the secrecy around Swift's music, Joel couldn't tell his kids where he was going, even though he was flying out close to Christmastime.
"I had to say 'trust me, guys. When you find out who I'm going away to work with you'll understand'. It was a crazy time but we wrote some great songs and had a blast."
Watch Joel working with Taylor Swift in a scene from the 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana:
To make a great song, music producers have to not only connect with an artist but for a brief, intense time become part of their world, Joel says.
"Trying to get a hit" is not his approach, though.
"I just try and write good songs and hone in on what the artist needs. The rest of it's so out of my hands that I can't really control it. I just let it run its course and hope for the best.
"You never know which of these songs are actually gonna turn into songs that are released. We just get together and see what we come up with on the day. If it's good it potentially comes out and if it's not then nobody ever hears it ... The hundreds of songs that nobody hears are… yeah, besides the point."
Joel says that although he's good at what he does, has "worked his ass off" and also made the most of opportunities, he wouldn't be where he is now without the help of other people.
Big Fan - the world-class music production facility and all-ages venue that he and his wife Gemma have opened in Morningside - is a way to pay that forward.
All hiring fees charged by Big Fan will go straight back into the not-for-profit foundation it's run by, he says.
"We've put a lot of cents into it and we're never going to take a cent out of it."
Joel hopes Big Fan will be a place where young people can get a sense of whether they want to pursue a career in music - and also gain confidence.
"It's not all about people being successful and having a big career … it's also the smaller impactful things you get from being creative and being around other people that are like-minded. There's a satisfaction that you get from that and you learn about communicating, it builds your confidence… you can gain a lot of that from music and just a lot of enjoyment in general from being creative."
Gemma and Joel Little Photo: Guy Coombes
Joel hopes overseas artists will eventually visit Big Fan for writing camps and recording sessions.
"People in LA have this perception that New Zealand is 300 hours away. They don't really understand that it's closer than Australia and that the time difference is better ... I think once I get a few people down to New Zealand they'll all start coming down. It's a special place and it's a special place to write songs I think."
Although Joel enjoys spending time in Los Angeles, he also likes leaving after a few weeks.
"LA is where the [music] industry is and it's really fun. The energy here when you work in the [music] world is really heightened and intense.
"But for me to be able to go back to New Zealand and work in my studio there and get some separation … it's made the songs I've done since sound better. 'Cause you have the time and space to do it without a million other things going on and all the other things come with being in LA."
Last year he sold the rights to his 178-song catalogue to the UK's Hipgnosis Songs Fund.
This not only enabled Joel and Gemma to get Big Fan off the ground without revenue expectations, it also represents a clean slate for his songwriting.
"It kind of got me motivated for writing songs going forward. Because I'd had so much success up to that point I was kind of like 'what do I do now?"
"Chances are it won't match the depth and success of the original one but it's still a fun goal to have and a nice way to look at things now.
"I just love writing songs so I'm not going to stop doing it. It's kind of fun to have that being part of the drive as well - to see what I can do with this next chapter."
Joel Little played…
Coolio: 'Gangsta's Paradise'
Joel was 11 - and writing "terrible terrible" raps - when this song came out.
"[Coolio] was a big influence on me. I feel like I could still probably rap the entire song now… this was definitely a song that got me into writing songs."
Elvin Bishop: 'Fooled Around and Fell in Love'
"This was Gemma and my first dance song at our wedding … I wanted to put a song in there to pay tribute to Gemma and everything that she's done.
"It's just a cute song about us. When we got together we definitely weren't thinking about being together 17 years later but here we are."
Lou Reed: 'Perfect Day'
Joel is grateful to his father for introducing him to Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground and David Bowie when he was a kid.
For his ninth birthday, he requested 'Everything I Do' by Bryan Adams, but the "cassette-shaped present" turned out to be Ziggy Stardust.
The Crocodiles: 'Tears'
This 'amazing incredible song' was co-written by the late Arthur Baysting who was a mentor to Joel.
"He was one of those people to me that I want Big Fan to be for other people ... He was the guy who, when I was trying to get [post-punk band] Goodnight Nurse up and running said 'why don't you just sing yourself? Either you'll get better or you'll find someone by being out there on the circuit and meeting other bands'.
"That advice has always stuck with me at every point - why don't you just do it yourself? … that way you won't stall."
